Reminder: Parking for YAPC::NA

If you plan to park at YAPC::NA 2012, either during the day or overnight and want a guaranteed parking spot, you need to reserve it before May 15th. 

Fill out this form to reserve your parking spot.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

MooseX::App::Cmd

I'm finally taking advantage of the co-maintainer bit that Yuval Kogman gave me last year and putting out new releases of MooseX::App::Cmd.

How to do confrence proceedings in (Xe)Latex

So, I had actually been wondering this for quite a while as I had thought that I would at some point be asked to typeset a journal or conference proceedings. I searched on Google but I could never get anything worthwhile to come up. However, I decided the time for research was over and the time to just attempt it was on me; this is also because I now have a publisher for the colloquium proceedings that I am running in the summer.

So, first of all some code

Perl and Cucumber

On one hand, I love getting bug reports for my Cucumber on Perl distro - it means people are using it, which is nice. On the other hand, I wish I hadn't but the bugs in in the first place...

LinuxFund.org is sponsoring YAPC::NA 2012! Linux Fund is a...



LinuxFund.org is sponsoring YAPC::NA 2012!

Linux Fund is a community-neutral 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides financial and administrative support to the open source community. We have given away over $750,000 to open source events and projects around the world since our founding in 1999 using funds raised through our line of credit cards and direct donations.

Our primary focus is to bring promising OSI-compliant software projects to production status and foster the community efforts surrounding them.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Should I buy that Perl book?

"Mike" asks on blogs.perl.org "Is the book worth buying?", specifically asking about The Definitive Guide to Catalyst.

I wrote this over a year ago, but I never posted it. I found it again when I was writing Can you learn Perl from an old Learning Perl?. I still like it, so I've give it to you.

At the heart of this question is (probably) the definition of economics: "How do I spend my limited resources on any of my alternatives to reach my goal?" There are, at least, three components there:

  • Your resources (money, time)
  • The alternatives
  • Your goal

The first two are easy to quantify. You probably know how much money, time, and effort you want to spend. You can easily get a list of books available for acquisition (donation, purchase, library loan). The third one is a bit more complex, and the hardest one for a book's author to satisfy. It's also the one that makes Mike's question almost impossible to answer, so start with that.

What are the goals?

A Little Light(?) Reading

Courtesy of the Hacker News Twitter feed, I read a really interesting piece from slate.

Where's _why? by Annie Lowrey

Ostensibly, the article is about the former Ruby developer, enthusiast, mascot and resident oddball named "_why". He dramatically disappeared from the open-source world dramatically one day, taking all of his software and writings with him. But that's not the only theme of the article.

The article's driving thread is the author learning some basic programming, and learning in part from _why. The more interesting thing is the outsider-become-closer-to-insider perspective on the hacker culture. This include the response of the Ruby community to _why leaving and the effort to find, save, and adopt his works.

Read it, I found it thought provoking and a great read.

YAPC Proceedings

We've already mentioned in the "Call for Speakers", that we'd like to print proceedings for this years' YAPC::Europe. We think that proceedings are a good way to call back the talks you have heard and to get more information about topics you were unable to attend.

It would be great to have a "book" with (nearly) all talks of the schedule...

So we ask the speakers to send their talks as papers, too. We use the tools that were created for the German Perl Workshop many years ago. As this is a proven toolchain, we can provide packages that the speakers can use to write the papers. There is a package for each of these three formats: Pod, PerlPoint, LaTeX. You can find the "HowTo" on our website.

Please send your papers to proceedings@yapc2012.de.

Residence Hall Reservations Close in 2 Weeks

If you want to reserve a dorm room for YAPC::NA 2012, then you have only 2 weeks left to do it. Reservations officially close on May 14th.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

More Mojolicious + Bootstrap Awesomeness

As Joel Berger wrote in a previous post both Mojolicious and Bootstrap from Twitter are awesome frameworks.

I have created a boilerplate in order to have a starting point for we application development and put it on github. On the first page of the repository there are mentioned some of the features and things this boilerplate will help you with, like:

  • Configurable application menu based on user type
  • Unified user notification through messages displayed (alert, success, info)
  • Examples of using the Mojolicious sessions
I added today two examples of photo galleries:

The photos in the gallery are from the first Cluj.PM meeting from 2nd of March 2012
(Thank you Ovidiu for making such beautiful pictures ).

The boilerplate can be seen in action on dotCloud if you want to see how awesome web applications look with Bootstrap.

I have to keep this post short because I run out of time for today, but I want to invite you to give a try to this boilerplate, use it and abuse it - of course, contributions are more than welcome and will be rewarded with fame and glory, displaying contributors name on the front page of the repository :P

rjbs advises to avoid given/when

Having been liberated from Perl 5.8.8 only recently (and not completely, really), I've never used given/when. rjbs explains some gotchas.

From http://irclog.perlgeek.de/crimsonfu/2012-03-16#i_5305433

Kickin' it old school

I'm sure you remember the good ol' days of typing programs straight out of a book hoping to see something which looks like this:

YAPC::NA 2013 Call for Venue

YAPC::NA 2013 Call for Venue :

If you’re interested in running YAPC next year, then apply to organize it!

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

Perl Conference in Kiev, Ukraine

Hi, I'm glad to announce great news this time :-)

We are hosting the 5th YAPC::Russia "May Perl" combined with the Ukrainian Perl Workshop "Perl Mova" in Kiev on 12-13 May this year.

This year is special as we have invited two guest speakers, Tatsuhiko Miyagawa and Gabor Szabo. Yeah, I'd like to thank my colleagues in Kiev who managed both to invite them and to find the sponsor.

The citizens of the EU, UK and US do not need any visa to visit Kiev. No conference attendance fee needed neither.

Kiev in May is extremely attractive city, it's worth seeing it! People from six countries are already in the list of the attendees.

Join at perlmova.org/yr2012.

Oslo rocks Open Source!!!

I love Oslo. Apart from the sheer beauty of the place, the truly civilized society, and the delicious fish and potatoes, the Open Source community in Norway is one of the most active and successful anywhere on the planet.

So, after a fantastic visit last August, I was delighted to be invited back to Oslo next month. There will nearly a full week of public events, all of which are open for anyone who wants to be involved.

First up, Oslo.pm is running three more Perl courses at Redpill Linpro's great training facility in Storo from Wednesday April 18. Two of those three courses are world premieres (of my brand new Testing and API Design classes), and the third is one of my all-time most popular classes: the ever-evolving "Productive Programmer" seminar. All the classes will be in English, and if you're interested in taking part, registrations are now open.

Alien::Base is almost ready

Not too long ago I mentioned on this blog that Alien::Base had reached a milestone, well today I’m announcing that its getting even closer.

Before I get there lets recap. The Alien namespace contains modules which provide external libraries to Perl modules. Alien:: modules typically can detect the presence of a library on your system or if not, install it. Then they can provide the locations and other information to the Perl modules that need them. Alien::Base aims to make these modules easier to write by providing most of this functionality in a configurable way.

Alien::Base, once it has decided that a computer does not have the library, will try to install it. One of my biggest concepts in designing Alien::Base is where it installs the library to. In contrast to attempting to install it to the system-at-large, it puts it in a static data location relative to the Alien:: module in question; it does this via File::ShareDir. Why is this important? Several reasons:

YAPC::NA SOLD OUT!!!

We have officially sold 411 tickets to YAPC::NA 2012, which means we are officially sold out! 

Some of you might be thinking, “Why would you book such a small venue?” The truth is we booked a very large venue. We’ve just sold more tickets to YAPC::NA than any other year of the conference thus far. Selling out is a good thing for the community. It means that Perl is vibrant and people want to learn and participate. Every YAPC organizer wants the years that follow them to out-sell them, because every YAPC organizer is building upon the foundations set by what came before. We want the same for YAPC::NA 2013.

I’m sorry for those of you who still wanted to register, but now can’t. I wish we could accommodate you, but there simply isn’t any additional room. We hope to see you next year instead.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

cPanel sponsors YAPC::Europe 2012

We welcome cPanel as a Platinum Sponsor of this years' YAPC::Europe. It's amazing to get so much support from companies using Perl. Thanks!

cpanel.png

cPanel is the industry leader for turning standalone servers into a fully automated point-and-click hosting platform. Tedious tasks are replaced by web interfaces and API-based calls. cPanel is designed with multiple levels of administration including admin, reseller, end user, and email-based interfaces. These multiple levels provide security, ease of use, and flexibility for everyone from the server administrator to the email account user.

cPanel is an organization that wins the loyalty of customers around the world by providing feature-rich applications backed by a team of developers, technical support engineers and quality assurance experts that provide stable builds, direct support, and fantastic customer service.

cPanel powers web hosting companies and organizations that have a need to automate and offer competitive hosting services.

Perl module ideas #3

About the Perl Module Ideas posting series. Previous posts: #1, #2.

1. RSS::Mention::*. This is a class of modules which can generate an RSS feed to monitor mentions. Particularly I am interested of people mentioning my CPAN modules (so, RSS::Mention::CPAN::Module). The module should query search engine(s), exclude results from CPAN mirrors, and put the rest into a database. The module should also have an option to generate a feed for mentions of all modules belonging to a certain CPAN author. One problem for this is that Google seems to ignore "::" in search query, even within quotes.

2. Something like Blog::Spam, but instead of detecting blog comments or forum posts, it should ban/delete rogue user registrations, including inserting bans for a range of IP's to block frequent registrations. There are already blacklist services for this, like stopforumspam. I have been seeing lots of spammy forum registrations lately (well, not lately, this has been going on for quite some time, but the frequency increases). The registrations are done by human (so they get through all kinds of CAPTCHA's and filtering questions).

Fun with Git

So, git has the —all command, which adds all tracked and untracked files for staging to commit. I really dislike this because I wanted something that would just add all the tracked files for staging to commit. So, a friend of mine in the office said that he had a shell script which did it so I give you git add for only tracked files:

git status | grep "modified: " | awk '{print $3}' | xargs git add

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